The prizes model seems to be very labour intesive since it involves many autonomous groups working towards the same goal. If they are all working on the same thing, but not cooperating, then they are all working to overcome the same problems and only one group will get paid for it (the prize money).
This seems to me like potentially a very wasteful way of accomplishing a goal since many people will contribute a lot of work and never see any money for it.
I know what you mean. And while we're at it, this whole idea of having 50 different states pass their own laws, that's silly. I mean, crime is crime, right? Why not apply the same solutions in NYC as in Boston or Spokane or...?
My God people, I am floored by the number of people who don't understand how "competition" works -- or why it can be globally beneficial. There will be some redundancy. Some of it will allow development of differing modes, a fallback position, so to speak. The rest will wither away except for the optimal solutions... and isn't that what you want?
You can no more chart out a plan of maximmal scientific progress, with no duplications, than you can... well, than you can operate an economy entirely through decreed Five Year Plans.
Wow. I've been reading slashdot for a long time now but rarely have I seen a poster get it so entirely wrong.
For one, who is to say they won't overpay for something? OK, we'll leave aside the economic tautology that the proper price of something is what someone's willing to pay for it. Let's just look at this important fact: Until the project produces, no money changes hands. This contrasts with the current system, when NASA makes a wishlist, a corporation purports to fulfill it, and then everyone walks away with the cash whether or not the project actually comes to fruition. At least in the new model, no money is "wasted" until there is an actual product.
But wait. What if NASA says "Space Probe Frobozz is worth $10M to us" but company X can build space probe Frobozz for only $3M? Aren't we "wasting" $7M? No. NASA paid what it thought was reasonable. Company X made $7M -- which is a good incentive to get into the business. If you only pay companies for the cost of materials, they're not gonna line up to service your mission. The idea here is to tap the very powerful profit motive (perhaps you've heard of it?) so eminently a part of the American experience.
Also, if the prize isn't large enough, some of the major players capable of making things happen might stay away form competing because of not having enough money to compete or because the return on investment is too low.
Let's leave aside that this completely subverts your first argument. Are you saying that "major players" will be scared away by a return on investment that is too low, so we should pad it? Obviously, companies will want to make a healthy profit; if NASA sets the prize too low for space probe Frobozz, then no one will step up to make it. The solution of course would be to then raise the prize money. At some point, one of two things will happen: (a) The prize gets high enough to entice companies to compete for it or (b) The price gets high enough to exceed NASA's estimate of the value of space probe Frobozz, so the contest never yields Frobozz. Either of these are valid and proper economic outcomes. You want Frobozz so bad? Cough up for it.
Now ask yourself, If you was [sic] the CEO of a large publicaly traded company, how many times would your investor/board of directors let you compete in good faith[?]
Well, if I were the CEO of a large publicly-traded company, I would hope I understand basic economics, including the fact that risk underlies all economic activity. I'd know that competing in good faith is about all my company does, every day, and is something to be neither feared nor ashamed of.
When after spending X amount of money to acomplish goals X and Z, your bigest competitor beats you to the punch and your out X amount of dollars and little hope of recycleing the research that went into it.
Again, that's how it goes, except of course it hardly ever goes that way. Your biggest competitor seems to have stolen a march on you, but then, that means you're not economically viable. But most likely the research you've done will be "recyclable", because you've learned a lot about whatever was being pursued. Ah, competition continues, to the good of the American public. If the odds were high that your competitor would beat you, you'd probably not invest the effort. But it's that element of risk that makes the market work.
The X-prize worked for what it was intended for because that was the sum of money to make it attractive for other buisinesses to get into the market and that money wasn't competing with any other projects.
I suggest that you take an economics class and learn the concept of "opportunity cost". There is never a time when money spent on one thing has no other
from when people first got cars and the mechanically-inclined relative was expected to help keep it running. The price of knowing what to do is being asked to do it.
The funny thing is, with the right incentives, we could create jobs. Moving to renewable (and cleaner) energy will be a gazillion dollar industry for the first few that do it right.
Ah, but that's "we the American people", not "we the entrenched energy and manufacturing industries." And we all know which "we" has the ear of this White House.
After all, most people in New York City don't get up at 4am to milk cows, feed pigs, or plow fields.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that most people in upstate NY also do not do these things...
Second, I'm beginning to get really tired of statements like
People who live in Montana, for example, don't want people in New York City telling them how to live their lives
because this election and its aftermath are showing, very clearly, that people who live in Montana seem quite content to tell people in New York City how to live their lives. You don't like welfare spending or mass transit? OK, fine. I don't like cheese subsidies or you trying to define what "marriage" means for me.
It's funny how, when it's an economic issue, it's all "We are fifty sovereign states" but when it's a (so-called) moral issue, all of a sudden we are one nation. As if we all have no responsibility to look out for one another but some of us have a God-given duty to interfere in other people's personal lives...
True Democracy would entail every person voting on everything that would happen. Can you imagine election day, every day for things like peanut subsidies?
I have this vision of a world of trained software agents, busily buzzing about your business, casting votes on your behalf along the lines you've trained them to...
Then I look closer and see every one of them sports a spiffy "Microsoft" logo, and I wake up screaming...
Had they stayed at home, they would have become good farmers or blacksmiths (or, who knows, perhaps even philosophers, searching for a better tomorrow), good husbands to their wives, good fathers to their sons and daughters...
... at least until the Beast With No Name arose from Beyond the Black Void and ate the world, as prophesied.:)
The point that complaining and telling people off is not in any way constructive.
No, actually, it's often the necessary first step to getting people to change. Things are the way they are in part because nobody has had the gumption to tell these people off.
If he really cared about this problem, and wanted to be constructive in helping solve it rather than just attacking others, he has the perfect platform.
Indeed. If only he would use his celebrity to get invited to a nationally-broadcast serious show, where he could make his serious points in a relevant context.... oh, wait. That's what he did. If The Daily Show tries to remake itself into a serious news show, he will lose his audience and hence his pull, and nobody will listen to or care about anything he says.
By the way, it's not like The Daily Show doesn't take swings at the bland, uninformative, and partisan media, either. He wasn't really saying anything new here.
Key Republicans are discussing changing the Constitution to allow people not born in the USA to run for President.
Does being born somewhere else automatically disqualify you as a decent human being? As being unable to appreciate freedom? Does being born in America somehow knight you with spectacular democratic values?
Now, you'd expect that you'd want the person becoming President to have evidenced a commitment to the US. That's why any serious proposal already includes a significant time requirement -- either 20 or 35 years as a citizen -- before a foreign-born person could run. I like the 35 years, as that's how long I, as a native-born American citizen, would have to wait.
But if you're worried about a Manchurian Candidate option... don't you think those evil other countries could find some American-born patsy?
Redmond used to be called MCP Magazine, as in Microsoft Certified Professionals.
Gee, I always thought it stood for Master Control Program -- you know, the operating system from Tron that is hellbent on world domination and is in fact the Ultimate Evil... oh, wait. Same thing.:)
It is just as plausible to say that Watergate was a Democrat plot to make Nixon look bad.
Except of course that the Watergate burglars were caught and identified. And lo and behold, they were all in the employ of the President and his minions. Y'idjit
But I guess it's the truth as spoken by Homer Simpson: "You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true."
The Constitution clearly states that Congress is responsible for paying debts (see below).
Fair enough. But it is a solidly Republican Congress. And the President is the leader of his party and therefore exerts considerable influence over its legislative agenda. Of course Congress deserves its share of scorn and blame. But the failure of a President to move through a friendly Congress anything he claims to support, indicates either he is really bad at being President or he doesn't really care about the thing in question.
Everything that didn't move or have a heat signature or set off the interferometers got bombed.
All hail, ye wardens of all mighty Air Power. After all, strategic bombing is going to make all other branches of the military utterly obsolete Any Day Now. Despite what the flyboys tell you, things escape during bombings. Sure, we're way more accurate now. But we never had an American soldier on each square foot, and that's what you'd need.
It isn't at all hard to believe that bin Laden paid off some warlord or flunky and slipped out the hole in the "airtight perimeter" thus created.
One person got paid $5,000 for nine days. The town made $100,000. In two weeks. Not bad. Let's just ssee how it plays out.
It's not about the money. It's about the license taken by the producers. Those people weren't paid for their reactions on a reality show. They were paid for help in producing a movie. If they had known the ultimate destination of the footage, they might have been OK with it. Or they might have demanded more money. Or they might have chosen not to participate. The point is, they were denied that choice. In essence a fraud was perpetrated on them.
(And don't give me any of those "people play pranks on their friends all the time" lines. These people weren't friends; they were business associates. It matters.)
This isn't a "good thing all around". It's a terrible thing. Basically, a bunch of people in "the biz" decided it would be funny to fool a small town community. They came in, lied, manipulated, and essentially disrespected these people, then decided that their trust was worth about $100,000. The donated money is a bribe, plain and simple, to buy off the feeble stirrings of conscience in Shatner, et al.
I see this happening more and more, and it's starting to get to me. People aren't here for your entertainment. Real people aren't the Sims, for Pete's sake. They don't go about their lives just to relieve the tedium of yours. It's a bad thing to treat people as if they were just means to be used in achieving your ends, whether that's something cartoony grand or as mundane as filling half an hour of that gaping void that is your life.
People are not means only.
I don't care that they got "genuine reactions" and "true feeling" and all that other crap that producers of shows like this believe justify their deceptions. In the end, a bunch of Hollywood types decided that small town people can be easily duped for the entertainment of a jaded national audience.
And for all those who asked, back when the reality craze fist hit, what harm Survivor etc. could do... well, here we are. These people didn't volunteer for the reality show; they were impressed into service, kidnapped.
... back in the halycon days of (August) 2001, one of my fellow teachers asked, "But why are we trying to militarize space?" And the extremely friendly and capable major answered thusly: Space is valuable real estate. Near-Earth operations support a multi-billion dollar industry whose importance and value to the free industrialized world is increasing exponentially. Of that value, a vastly disproportionate amount is American. It will become a target. It will eventually become too tempting to be ignored, and then somebody is going to militarize space, whether or not we do.
Or, actually, he put it more succintly: "The United States is not going to deploy the first offensive weapons in space. But once somebody does, the very next day we damn sure are going to deploy the second one -- and it'll be superior."
I think the US Air Force, and the military in general, would prefer to see space remain non-militarized for as long as it possibly can -- but they're not dumb enough to think that "as long as possible" is the same as "forever".
"(In China), they are saying, 'This is the law of the land, and there is nothing we can do to change it.'"
Doubly so, if you don't even try. Everyone everywhere who decides to knuckle under always justifies it as "Well, I couldn't change the system, so what's the point?"
The point is, until someone tries to change the system, you never know what can. All progressive revolutions have begun through small acts of defiance -- ones that individually seemed to have no chance of success. Remember Rosa Parks, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you mean. And while we're at it, this whole idea of having 50 different states pass their own laws, that's silly. I mean, crime is crime, right? Why not apply the same solutions in NYC as in Boston or Spokane or
My God people, I am floored by the number of people who don't understand how "competition" works -- or why it can be globally beneficial. There will be some redundancy. Some of it will allow development of differing modes, a fallback position, so to speak. The rest will wither away except for the optimal solutions... and isn't that what you want?
You can no more chart out a plan of maximmal scientific progress, with no duplications, than you can... well, than you can operate an economy entirely through decreed Five Year Plans.
For one, who is to say they won't overpay for something?
OK, we'll leave aside the economic tautology that the proper price of something is what someone's willing to pay for it. Let's just look at this important fact: Until the project produces, no money changes hands. This contrasts with the current system, when NASA makes a wishlist, a corporation purports to fulfill it, and then everyone walks away with the cash whether or not the project actually comes to fruition. At least in the new model, no money is "wasted" until there is an actual product.
But wait. What if NASA says "Space Probe Frobozz is worth $10M to us" but company X can build space probe Frobozz for only $3M? Aren't we "wasting" $7M? No. NASA paid what it thought was reasonable. Company X made $7M -- which is a good incentive to get into the business. If you only pay companies for the cost of materials, they're not gonna line up to service your mission. The idea here is to tap the very powerful profit motive (perhaps you've heard of it?) so eminently a part of the American experience.
Let's leave aside that this completely subverts your first argument. Are you saying that "major players" will be scared away by a return on investment that is too low, so we should pad it? Obviously, companies will want to make a healthy profit; if NASA sets the prize too low for space probe Frobozz, then no one will step up to make it. The solution of course would be to then raise the prize money. At some point, one of two things will happen: (a) The prize gets high enough to entice companies to compete for it or (b) The price gets high enough to exceed NASA's estimate of the value of space probe Frobozz, so the contest never yields Frobozz. Either of these are valid and proper economic outcomes. You want Frobozz so bad? Cough up for it.
Well, if I were the CEO of a large publicly-traded company, I would hope I understand basic economics, including the fact that risk underlies all economic activity. I'd know that competing in good faith is about all my company does, every day, and is something to be neither feared nor ashamed of.
Again, that's how it goes, except of course it hardly ever goes that way. Your biggest competitor seems to have stolen a march on you, but then, that means you're not economically viable. But most likely the research you've done will be "recyclable", because you've learned a lot about whatever was being pursued. Ah, competition continues, to the good of the American public. If the odds were high that your competitor would beat you, you'd probably not invest the effort. But it's that element of risk that makes the market work.
I suggest that you take an economics class and learn the concept of "opportunity cost". There is never a time when money spent on one thing has no other
... but ED 209.
:)
Now put down that weapon. You have 30 seconds to comply.
No, no one ever disappeared. They were simply retroactively not born...
from when people first got cars and the mechanically-inclined relative was expected to help keep it running. The price of knowing what to do is being asked to do it.
I agree. You'd never see the Republicans implying that Kerry is the spawn of Satan while Bush is chosen by God... They'd come right out and say it.
Hmm, interesting. I had thought the President had to sign any treaties, but I guess he can delegate.
Ah, but that's "we the American people", not "we the entrenched energy and manufacturing industries." And we all know which "we" has the ear of this White House.
Well, that would have been unconstitutional, as Al Gore has never held the office of President. His signature would mean nothing.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that most people in upstate NY also do not do these things...
Second, I'm beginning to get really tired of statements like
because this election and its aftermath are showing, very clearly, that people who live in Montana seem quite content to tell people in New York City how to live their lives. You don't like welfare spending or mass transit? OK, fine. I don't like cheese subsidies or you trying to define what "marriage" means for me.
It's funny how, when it's an economic issue, it's all "We are fifty sovereign states" but when it's a (so-called) moral issue, all of a sudden we are one nation. As if we all have no responsibility to look out for one another but some of us have a God-given duty to interfere in other people's personal lives...
Well, Nixon crippled the Presidency for quite some time...
Oh, wait. You meant on purpose...
I have this vision of a world of trained software agents, busily buzzing about your business, casting votes on your behalf along the lines you've trained them to...
Then I look closer and see every one of them sports a spiffy "Microsoft" logo, and I wake up screaming...
No, actually, it's often the necessary first step to getting people to change. Things are the way they are in part because nobody has had the gumption to tell these people off.
Indeed. If only he would use his celebrity to get invited to a nationally-broadcast serious show, where he could make his serious points in a relevant context.... oh, wait. That's what he did. If The Daily Show tries to remake itself into a serious news show, he will lose his audience and hence his pull, and nobody will listen to or care about anything he says.
By the way, it's not like The Daily Show doesn't take swings at the bland, uninformative, and partisan media, either. He wasn't really saying anything new here.
Does being born somewhere else automatically disqualify you as a decent human being? As being unable to appreciate freedom? Does being born in America somehow knight you with spectacular democratic values?
Now, you'd expect that you'd want the person becoming President to have evidenced a commitment to the US. That's why any serious proposal already includes a significant time requirement -- either 20 or 35 years as a citizen -- before a foreign-born person could run. I like the 35 years, as that's how long I, as a native-born American citizen, would have to wait.
But if you're worried about a Manchurian Candidate option
Well, not for intentional comedy, anyway...
Gee, I always thought it stood for Master Control Program -- you know, the operating system from Tron that is hellbent on world domination and is in fact the Ultimate Evil... oh, wait. Same thing.
Or maybe, I dunno, making a joke? For gosh sakes, everyone, just calm and recognize that there can be humor in nearly any circumstance.
Except of course that the Watergate burglars were caught and identified. And lo and behold, they were all in the employ of the President and his minions. Y'idjit
But I guess it's the truth as spoken by Homer Simpson: "You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true."
Fair enough. But it is a solidly Republican Congress. And the President is the leader of his party and therefore exerts considerable influence over its legislative agenda. Of course Congress deserves its share of scorn and blame. But the failure of a President to move through a friendly Congress anything he claims to support, indicates either he is really bad at being President or he doesn't really care about the thing in question.
All hail, ye wardens of all mighty Air Power. After all, strategic bombing is going to make all other branches of the military utterly obsolete Any Day Now. Despite what the flyboys tell you, things escape during bombings. Sure, we're way more accurate now. But we never had an American soldier on each square foot, and that's what you'd need.
It isn't at all hard to believe that bin Laden paid off some warlord or flunky and slipped out the hole in the "airtight perimeter" thus created.
It's not about the money. It's about the license taken by the producers. Those people weren't paid for their reactions on a reality show. They were paid for help in producing a movie. If they had known the ultimate destination of the footage, they might have been OK with it. Or they might have demanded more money. Or they might have chosen not to participate. The point is, they were denied that choice. In essence a fraud was perpetrated on them.
(And don't give me any of those "people play pranks on their friends all the time" lines. These people weren't friends; they were business associates. It matters.)
This isn't a "good thing all around". It's a terrible thing. Basically, a bunch of people in "the biz" decided it would be funny to fool a small town community. They came in, lied, manipulated, and essentially disrespected these people, then decided that their trust was worth about $100,000. The donated money is a bribe, plain and simple, to buy off the feeble stirrings of conscience in Shatner, et al.
I see this happening more and more, and it's starting to get to me. People aren't here for your entertainment. Real people aren't the Sims, for Pete's sake. They don't go about their lives just to relieve the tedium of yours. It's a bad thing to treat people as if they were just means to be used in achieving your ends, whether that's something cartoony grand or as mundane as filling half an hour of that gaping void that is your life.
People are not means only.
I don't care that they got "genuine reactions" and "true feeling" and all that other crap that producers of shows like this believe justify their deceptions. In the end, a bunch of Hollywood types decided that small town people can be easily duped for the entertainment of a jaded national audience.
And for all those who asked, back when the reality craze fist hit, what harm Survivor etc. could do... well, here we are. These people didn't volunteer for the reality show; they were impressed into service, kidnapped.
... back in the halycon days of (August) 2001, one of my fellow teachers asked, "But why are we trying to militarize space?" And the extremely friendly and capable major answered thusly: Space is valuable real estate. Near-Earth operations support a multi-billion dollar industry whose importance and value to the free industrialized world is increasing exponentially. Of that value, a vastly disproportionate amount is American. It will become a target. It will eventually become too tempting to be ignored, and then somebody is going to militarize space, whether or not we do.
Or, actually, he put it more succintly: "The United States is not going to deploy the first offensive weapons in space. But once somebody does, the very next day we damn sure are going to deploy the second one -- and it'll be superior."
I think the US Air Force, and the military in general, would prefer to see space remain non-militarized for as long as it possibly can -- but they're not dumb enough to think that "as long as possible" is the same as "forever".
Doubly so, if you don't even try. Everyone everywhere who decides to knuckle under always justifies it as "Well, I couldn't change the system, so what's the point?"
The point is, until someone tries to change the system, you never know what can. All progressive revolutions have begun through small acts of defiance -- ones that individually seemed to have no chance of success. Remember Rosa Parks, anyone?